Resolving Conflicts and Merging Changes
When you sync your local branch with the remote branch, you may encounter merge conflicts. Merge conflicts occur when Git is unable to automatically resolve the differences between the two versions of a file. In such cases, you'll need to manually resolve the conflicts before you can complete the merge.
Identifying Merge Conflicts
You can identify merge conflicts by running the git status
command after attempting to merge the remote changes:
git status
The output will show you the files that have merge conflicts, and you'll see something like this:
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in file.txt
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.
Resolving Merge Conflicts
To resolve the merge conflicts, you'll need to open the affected files and manually edit them to choose which changes to keep. Git will mark the conflicting sections with special markers, like this:
<<<<<<< HEAD
This is the version of the file in your local branch.
=======
This is the version of the file in the remote branch.
>>>>>>> origin/my-feature
You'll need to remove the conflict markers and choose the changes you want to keep, then save the file.
Completing the Merge
After resolving the conflicts in all the affected files, you can add the files to the staging area and commit the merge:
git add .
git commit -m "Resolve merge conflicts"
This will complete the merge process and update your local branch with the changes from the remote branch.
Merging with Rebasing
In some cases, you may want to use git rebase
instead of git merge
to sync your local branch with the remote branch. Rebasing allows you to "rewrite" the commit history of your local branch, which can result in a cleaner, more linear commit history.
git rebase origin/my-feature
This will move your local commits on top of the latest commits from the remote my-feature
branch. If there are any conflicts, you'll need to resolve them during the rebase process.
By understanding how to resolve merge conflicts and merge changes, you can effectively collaborate with your team and maintain a consistent codebase.